Since being activated from the IL and making his Blue Jays season debut, Daulton Varsho has slugged. He’s already gone yard six times, added three doubles, and currently sports a .636 SLG%, which is backed up by his expected slug of .590.
Now, this isn’t the first time Varsho has come out of the gates hot; his first nine games to begin his Blue Jays career in 2023 produced a 144 wRC+, and he’s undoubtedly had hot stretches before. I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s different this time, but some under-the-hood metrics would back up that notion.
For one, through his first 14 games, Varsho is running the highest xwOBA of his career (.355) thanks in large part to his gaudy 44.1% hard-hit rate, which is also the highest it’s ever been in his career. What’s even more interesting is that Varsho’s fly balls are going to the opposite field at the highest rate of his career thus far (29.4%), he’s also gone deep twice in that fashion as well and was flat out robbed of a two run double on Sunday by a unbelievable leaping catch at the wall by Akil Baddoo.
It’s been an intriguing development to watch Varsho turn himself into a prototypical slugger’s profile. His walk rate has dropped 3.9% and his strikeout rate has climbed 8.4% from last year, he’s sacrificed a bit of plate approach for the ability to absolutely crush the cover off of baseballs, his current average exit velocity (93.5 MPH) would be tied with Manny Machado for the 18th best mark in MLB, his barrel% (23.5) would be tops in all of baseball, and his hard-hit rate (50%) would be tied with Corey Seager for 37th best. Varsho also set a new career best max exit velo against the Rays back on the 13th of May when his fourth inning homer off Shane Baz left his bat at 113.9 MPH. The funny thing is Varsho then hit the *second* hardest hit ball off his career in the 8th inning when he homered again, this time off of Edwin Uceta, coming off the bat at 113.6.
The question you may be asking yourself now is, how’s he doing this? Is there a tangible change in approach or possibly mechanics? Let’s dive in.
As we can see, Varsho is a constant tinkerer at the plate. These screenshots (from videos on his Baseball Savant page) have been grouped in chronological order from 2023 (top left) to a few days ago. Varsho is a feel hitter, which makes him susceptible to wanting to tinker and experiment when he enters a slump.
Over the winter, David Popkins and Lou Iannotti met with Varsho and went over some video with him from his 2022 season with Arizona and noticed some subtle differences in his barrel placement and lower half from then to his most recent season with the Blue Jays. Something interesting that popped up when going through his numbers in pockets and matching them up with whatever stance iteration he was using at the time is that Varsho is a better hitter when the bat stands vertical as opposed to horizontal in his pre-pitch setup, something he did a lot more in Arizona and has brought back in 2025. It allows him to stay relaxed in the box and acts as a more natural precursor to his load. Think of the rubber band effect. It’s a much more natural, fluid motion going from point A to point B. The vertical barrel allows him to generate more torque as he cocks it back just as he’s getting ready to start his swing. The two videos below (from Baseball Savant) will give a better illustration.
In the first clip (April 2024), you can see that Varsho’s setup is a lot stiffer. He’s got the horizontal bat position, a slight bend in the knees, and doesn’t generate nearly the same amount of torque. In essence, it made him too easy to pitch against. There were multiple quadrants of the plate you could pitch to Varsho in 2024, and he would simply not be able to counteract it.
Down below, you can take a look at his hard-hit percentage on pitches in every quadrant of the strike zone. Clearly, susceptible to anything thrown inside, middle up, and down/away. He also wasn’t doing anything with pitches right down the middle. You can attribute a lot of that to his approach at the plate, whether that be pitch selection, trying less to slug and more of making contact, whatever it may be, but there’s no doubt his setup in the box wasn’t doing him any favours either.
Fast forward to 2025, and Varsho is now crushing balls on the inner half and doing what is supposed to be done with middle-middle cookies. The vertical bat placement, along with ditching the bent knees, is allowing him to relax at the plate and let his natural athleticism take over, not too dissimilar to what’s happened with Addison Barger as well this season.
There’s one other subtle change in Varsho’s mechanics from last year to this season. Were you able to catch it in the two clips juxtaposed? For those who didn’t, Varsho ditched the toe tap in favour of a mini leg kick, allowing him to sync up his motion from point A to point B in a more “hitterish” manner. The toe tap and leg kick mish-mash is something he’s gone back and forth with multiple different times throughout his career, but it just feels like with his current setup in the box, the leg kick makes more sense as the timing mechanism.
A ton of credit here goes to both Popkins and Iannotti, who have poured through countless hours of video and identified subtle yet massive mechanical changes to multiple hitters in this offence and have worked with them to correct it or in some cases overhaul it completely to put each individual in the best possible situation to succeed. Daulton Varsho is an ELITE defensive centerfielder. Daulton Varsho is also an ELITE baserunner. If Daulton Varsho has now turned himself into a borderline ELITE slugging outfielder, the Toronto Blue Jays would be wise to get him locked up for the foreseeable future.
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